All the Pretty Girls - J. T. Ellison [18]
“Bad news, babe?” she asked.
“I have to go to Georgia. They’ve found Shauna Davidson.”
And those four words stopped the gentleness of their morning.
Eight
Taylor was on full alert when she arrived at Betsy Garrison’s home. Betsy lived in East Nashville, once the habitat of drug lords and crack whores. But the neighborhood was “coming back,” as the residents liked to say. Hip new restaurants nestled in with Victorian homes, restored to within an inch of their former glory. Young professionals ruled the area, BMWs and Lexus SUVs gleaming in the driveways, ones bought with earned money rather than by illegal means. Trees soared into the sky with abandon, even the birds and squirrels had taken on a prosperous hue.
But the street where Betsy lived seemed to be in mourning on this rainy day. When Taylor rolled up in her black Xterra, she only recognized one other car parked strategically along the street, a beat-up Ford F-150 pickup. She sighed. No marked cars for this trip. You could say the police were undercover, protecting one of their own. There was no yellow crime scene tape blowing giddily in the breeze. No news vans lined the street. Word had been kept quiet, a need to know only, nothing broadcast over the air, all calls made to private phones and cells. An ambulance hadn’t even made its way down the narrow streets. Betsy had been taken out her back door and stuffed into the waiting car of her partner in Sex Crimes to be transported to the hospital.
Taylor shook her head at the ratty truck. Fitz definitely needed new wheels. But he stubbornly refused, swearing to stand by his rust bucket until the bitter end. From the looks of it, the end wasn’t far off. She pulled behind it, stepped carefully to the curb to avoid the puddle in the gutter, and snapped open her umbrella. She walked quickly up the driveway and around to the back door of the house. Fitz was standing there, the ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips. It was lit, and though Taylor felt a rush of annoyance at Fitz, who had quit smoking a number of times unsuccessfully, she immediately dug in her pocket for her own pack. Drawing up beside him, she lit her own and inhaled deeply. Only a slight tickle in her throat reminded her that the doctors would be royally ticked off if they knew she was smoking, but she dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand. Fitz caught the motion and grinned.
“Justifying your addiction to the noxious weed to your doctors in your head again?”
Taylor gave him an affectionate smile. Fitz just knew her too well. They’d worked together for several years, and despite the fact that she was nearly twenty years his junior and a woman to boot, he’d never had a problem with her being his boss. Just the opposite, he had been the one who’d stood by her promotion to lieutenant last year when many in the force did not. And he was one of the few who didn’t mind the new chief, either, but that was Fitz. Always willing, near retirement and couldn’t give a care to politics. Besides, the new chief had restructured the department in such a way that Fitz had gotten a promotion and pay raise, which did nothing but improve his mood. More to retire on, as he jovially put it. Now Homicide was set up so that Fitz was the sergeant and had six detectives working under him. He reported only to Taylor, and she, as the department lieutenant, reported only to Mitchell Price. It was a top-heavy hierarchy, but the people of Homicide had managed to come out unscathed and with more power than they had before. Price, being the captain, had control over all the CID, Criminal Investigations Division, and the lieutenants for each division reported to him and him alone. It gave him more authority but less oversight, so he depended heavily on his LTs to make all right in the world for him. He now reported directly to the chief, and the political headaches were worth it to him since he could keep his people out of the fray.
Taylor sucked on her cigarette and forced the thoughts of doctors’ disapproving glares out of her head